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Edmond council debates parking vs. trees at AC Kaplan sports complex; votes to continue
Summary
Council members sparred over a variance to eliminate landscaped parking islands (18 trees) to gain roughly 14 parking spaces at the proposed AC Kaplan Sports Complex. Staff and the design team said easements and subsurface conditions constrain tree planting; council voted to continue the item to Oct. 28 for more detail.
The Edmond City Council spent a large portion of its Oct. 14 meeting weighing a landscape‑and‑parking tradeoff for the proposed AC Kaplan Sports Complex.
James Hassard, landscape architect for Half Associates, told council the 27½‑acre site plan includes 10 ball fields, restroom and maintenance buildings and, in site revisions, between about 484 and 488 parking spaces depending on ongoing coordination with utilities. Hassard said underground utilities, a diagonal natural‑gas easement and localized former‑landfill and sandstone conditions limit where trees can be planted. Removing 18 landscaped parking islands with trees would add roughly 14 parking spaces compared with the latest plan, Hassard said; an earlier design iteration had produced up to 40 additional spaces relative to the existing site.
Several council members said the tradeoff — 14 additional spots versus 18 trees — did not justify granting a broad variance. One councilor said, "14 spots is not significant compared to 18 tree options," and another said they would vote no if this were a commercial application. Others urged caution because bids are already out and redesigning could delay construction; Hassard said bids were being awarded within about a week and revisions on that timeline would be tight.
Ryan Ochsner, Director of Community Quality, offered a compromise: limit the variance so tree islands would be removed only where private utility conflicts exist. Staff said that modification would allow the project to meet the ordinance except in those constrained locations and could be captured in the variance language.
After extended questioning, council agreed to a motion to continue the item to the Oct. 28 meeting and asked city staff and the developer to meet with council members and neighborhood representatives in the interim to clarify the numbers, show the original variance baseline, and identify which islands could and could not accommodate trees.
The hearing recorded detailed tradeoffs and an explicit schedule risk: staff said bidding is advanced and changing the construction drawings now could be tight but that alternates could be managed when bids are accepted. Council did not approve the variance on Oct. 14; it continued the item to allow staff to provide clearer comparisons and exact counts of islands, trees and parking spaces before a final vote.
